as we started working the backyard, more and more cool bugs were turning up.
tilling the garden and breaking up the rotting tree roots, i found several of these.

huge with eggs, this lady was going nowhere fast. i think these are a variety of longhorn beetles...called Pine Sawyers.

almost every time i went outside, i found a bess beetle. either walking around the yard, or on a log, or in the rotting stump.
i started thinking about the night life of the backyard...what was i missing if i was finding this many beetles during the day?
one night, armed with a little led light and my iphone, i went out into the yard for an adventure.

the rotting stump was full of life!

it was very cool to see, and totally makes me want to set up a sheet with a blacklight some night to see what i can find.
i peeked around the logs that we moved to the side of the yard, some of them were hollow and rotting too.

most of them had wild mushroom growth, and small bugs going wild inside. very cool!

ah spring. with the warmer weather came yardwork. lots of it. longer daylight hours cued the plants to start growing full steam...daffodils came up unexpectedly, and the azalea bushes launched into full pink blooming.
while raking out the red dyed mulch (yuck) all around our house, we started to uncover some cool stuff.
first was a large pupae...

i assume from a sphynx moth or something simliar. unfortunately, he'd gotten a bit of a prick from the rake and was oozing a tiny bit of fluid. i put him back in the yard in the hopes that he'd finish his transformation.

we also dug up a large bombadier beetle. shiny, almost violet iridiscent, with small red spots all over his wings.
he was lovely, but BOY HOWDY he stunk! i mistakenly handled him barehanded trying to get a clearer photo, my hands stunk for a whole day afterward.

giant click beetles started appearing randomly...middle of the day even. i walked out and found this guy on a log, just sitting and enjoying the sun. the logs from the tree hadn't been cut up, and were arranged on one small side of our backyard, providing a nice habitat for lots of wood borers.

birds continued to fledge, and i had to really scout the yard before i let the dogs out to play. this little robin was beside our shed hopping around...i walked him into the alley under the watchful eye of his parents so he wouldn't become a boston terrier snack.

this year i had the opportunity to go sample a few vernal pools for spotted salamanders and larvae.

vernal pools are basically like tidal pools of the woods. they fill up with water in the spring when the rains are heavy, allowing lots of amphibians to lay eggs that hatch before summer comes and the water dries up. they are the perfect breeding ground for invertebrates too, because usually there aren't fish populations to eat em! technically, there are not supposed to be fish in vernal pools. sometimes humans introduce them though, if the pool is big enough.

at the first pool, there were TONS of toad eggs, but not much salamander activity. i did find this guy running around the edge of the pool though.

he's a polydesmid millipede, and pretty harmless. millipedes are decomposers while centipedes are carnivorous hunters. millipedes really won't bite, while centipedes have a pretty gnarly venemous bite...kind of like a flesh rotting bee sting.

i'm always a little hesitant to grab up most millipedes because some species of them excrete a fluid from their exoskeleton as a defense mechanism when they are threatened. this fluid can be really aggrivating to the skin and some people have more abrasive reactions to it.

there were some snakes and turtles to be seen...even some fish. but finding no salamanders, we just tanked on.
the next pool offered up immeadite signs. lots of egg masses, already hatched!

the egg masses feel like jello. dunno why they were green, algae accumulation from ferilization nearby?
wading around, i wasn't finding much until i started scooping up water in the tupperware collection tubs.
then next thing you know....

larvae!

even found some larger ones in a different area of the pool.

overall a good day!

with the advent of spring came TONS of birds. with the big tree cut down, they were out of a space they'd been using for nesting. i guess they decided to get creative!
in addition to starlings nesting in our bathroom air vent, we noticed a problem with the winnebago one day...

upon closer inspection, what at first seemed like a weird mess in the radiator turned out to be a bird nest.

and it was FULL of baby birds!

i believe there were seven total, little baby wrens. the mom was busy in the backyard catching them bugs to eat, so i checked in on them every now and then to see how quick they were growing.

eventually they fledged, i found one of them in the crawl space step-down and helped him out. with no flight, there was no way he was gonna make it up out of a two foot deep hole.

this was the last time i saw the babies, before i knew it they had all fledged and the nest was empty. there are a bunch of wrens on the bird feeders these days!

so after we cut the tree down, we had a ton of carnage to deal with.

the whole yard was covered in branches and sticks and logs.

we started moving it all around, trying to consolidate all the big logs to one section of yard.

the small sticks and really rotting wood got taken to the dump.
while we were moving logs around, our Boston Terrier puppy started digging in a rotten section of one big log, and dug out a grub.

we ended up pulling a whole bunch of them out!

some of them were wrapped in dirt balls...
i decided to let them finish their transformation in the house...i took a huge storage jar and filled it with rotting wood and some loose soil, and put the grubs in it. i misted it every now and again with water, but mostly it sat on the mantle and i left it alone.
since i'd found the giant click beetle in the fallen logs, i was hoping i might end up with a bunch of those guys, but really i wasn't sure what they were going to be.
one morning i heard some noise coming from the jar and went to check it out.

we had beetles!
i wasn't sure what they were, but their body shape was much more scarab like than other beetles...i had a general idea of what family to start looking in.

after a few days, and consulting with the mom (she knows EVERYTHING!) i found that they were Hermit Beetles, a scarab family beetle that decomposes wood/plant matter, notorious for their grubs starting life in dirt balls! that explains the grubs in their casing!
i tossed em some apple slices to tide them over until the weekend, i wanted to release them back into the yard but i also wanted to take better pictures of them and time is tight during the weekdays.

i released them back into the huge rotting tree stump that remained after the arborists cut down the silver maple. hope to see them again sometime!

i bought a house this year, and was AMAZED at the amount of wildlife in the yard. after living downtown for years, it was a very welcome change.
some of the first signs were the incredibly high worm traffic...

early in the spring, after rains, the yard would be criss crossed with worm trails. exciting for our garden!
i decided to make a lil ol' blog to keep track of all the great bugs and wildlife i get to encounter.

when i moved in, first thing i noticed was the massive dying tree in the yard. it had tons of root rot and the base was destroyed. it was full of holes from woodpeckers and bugs.

it was still late winter/early spring, so there wasn't much bug life, but there were LOTS of birds. red headed woodpeckers, flickers, and wrens were always around. as things started to warm up, the bird traffic in the yard went crazy. we felt bad, but needed to cut down the tree.
it was looming over our garage and the neighbors phone lines, and was already cracking in half.

as the arborists were cutting, slices of logs revealed TONS of wood boring beetle paths.
i got excited, cause i love bess beetles, and i knew we'd probably be seeing em. in fact, when i first looked at the house, there was a dead bess beetle in the garage.

all the logs revealed some sort of rot.
after the tree was down and we were busily cleaning up debris, i found a giant click beetle...

it was a good sign of things to come!